This Week In Film Writing: Dec 19th Edition

THIS WEEK IN FILM WRITING is a weekly feature that highlights the best film journalism we could find from around the internet. These are the cinema articles you can’t afford to miss! Check it out, every Friday @ Noon!

Screencrush‘s Mike Ryan gives his review of  the dead-on-arrival The Interview:

“The truth is, The Interview is pretty dumb. It’s kind of amazing that this nonsense has sparked an international crises of sorts. The movie really doesn’t have much interesting to say—to be fair, it’s a comedy, why should it?—so I have to imagine all the bewildered higher-ups at Sony thinking, Was all of this worth it for THIS movie? (I suspect their answer is ‘no.’)”

GQ‘s Jen Oritz talks with James Franco about teaching film school and his project The Color of Time:

“[C.K. Williams] thought, Well, maybe I’ll go into the film business and write scripts. And I guess he realized that he should be writing poems and he gave up the screenwriting, but then the next thing he wrote was Tar. And I like to think that it wasn’t quite a, I don’t know, coincidence that I thought this book would be good as a movie. He wrote these little scenes, in a way. These poems are more cinematic, maybe, than a lot of poems.”

Film School Reject‘s Christopher Campbell on the Supporting Performances of the year that are getting overlooked for award season:

“Two actresses that have been mostly overlooked this season are Gone Girl‘s Carrie Coon and Nymphomaniac‘s Uma Thurman. I am among those disappointed that neither has won or at least been nominated for any major awards lately. I personally voted for the two women (alongside my third pick, Tilda Swinton in Snowpiercer) with my Critics Choice Awards ballot, but they didn’t make the cut. Not that any of those actually nominated by the BFCA shouldn’t be there — well, okay, maybe Meryl Streep for Into the Woods, but I haven’t seen that movie yet and can’t judge. The issue is that for every movie, there is one or maybe two main characters and then a whole slew of minor, and so there’s always a good chance that in a great movie there is a handful of award-worth supporting performances next to the one or two leads contending for the Oscar.”

/Film‘s Germain Lussier recaps Film Independent’s The Empire Strikes Back live read:

“JK Simmons was just as effective. Once Darth Vader is introduced on his Star Destroyer, Simmons almost willed his deep, staccato voice into the microphone, creating the menacing presence that is Darth Vader..”

The Dissolve‘s Keith Phipps on the aftermath of The Interview being cancelled by Sony:

“Ultimately, we value free expression. In America and in much of the rest of the world, it’s become the natural state of things, and we push back when it’s challenged. And now there’s a movie that we can’t see because it offends North Korea—or, if we’re withholding judgment, hackers sympathetic to North Korea..”